American Operatives Helping Push al Qaida’s “War of Attrition”

The ever-expanding list of U.S.-bred al Qaida operatives shows the terror group is trying to “flood the zone” of U.S. intelligence services to capitalize on what it considers a weakened America in the midst of a recession. This goal involves pushing forward an assortment of attacks and terror plots by lone wolves and poorly trained cells, experts say.

Al Qaida “has never claimed it could or would defeat the U.S. militarily. Instead, it seeks to wear us down economically through increasing expenditures on domestic security and overseas military commitments,” Georgetown University Professor Bruce Hoffman said in recent congressional testimony. “Given the current global economic downturn, this message arguably now has greater resonance with al Qaida’s followers and supporters and perhaps even with new recruits.”

The goal behind these activities is “to consume the attention of law enforcement and intelligence in the hopes that this distraction will permit more serious terrorist operations to go unnoticed and thereby sneak in ‘beneath the radar’ and succeed,” Hoffman said.

Al Qaida “and its Pakistani, Somali and Yemeni allies arguably have been able to accomplish the unthinkable: establishing at least an embryonic terrorist recruitment, radicalization and operational infrastructure in the United States with effects both at home and abroad,” Hoffman said.